The afterlife is falling apart, but I'm the actual devil and our chosen hero is so useless that he’s not even really Japanese -or- A Light Novel written in a day

Listen to me read this here

Preamble:

Some friends and I got together to each write a light novel over the course of a day without breaks and without getting to pre-plan anything. The quality of this piece reflects the mode of its creation, though with that context in mind, I am still quite happy with the result and greatly encourage everyone to also attempt such a challenge.

Arbitrage loaded, cocked, fired. Recoil making the thin colourful silk of her curtain-like sleeves flutter backwards erratically. Since Kaisa Solomon Goetia was the literal devil, a few bullets from a regular firearm arhythmically unloading into the space between her eyes obviously didn't do much except leave scorch marks, so Arbitrage kept going. Cock, fire, repeat, straight through the cranium into the heap of pillows beneath. It was the only way to wake her up, really. All damage healed instantly with beings like this, although a sample size of one probably wasn’t much to go on. Kaisa’s forehead had reformed before the bullet even exited out the other side, but the frictional heat of metal against neurons was still enough to interrupt some delta brainwaves if you were quick enough on the trigger, which Arbitrage was. Slowly the Devil’s eyes opened, revealing cat-like slitted pupils, only to behold the angel’s dumbass smile as she unloaded a few more rounds just for good measure.

“You better have a really fucking good explanation for this”, Kaisa moaned, pushing herself up from the sofa buried beneath pillows buried beneath void that constituted her room. Windows were affixed to the nothingness, looking out towards various stars destined to go supernova any minute now. There was also a heavy wooden door, massive and church-like, which hung from what could in the absence of law-abiding reality generously be described as a ceiling, though no one ever used it because it was locked.

The angel, a woman who was two meters tall, had ankles-long hair that wasn’t just white but emitting its own radiant light, and still holding the revolver she got on a trip to earth once, widened her smile to look even more blitzed out than she did by default. “Oh, you know, I’ve got one of those mysteries you like so much.”

A groan was heard through the pillow that Kaisa was now pressing into her own face, and Arbitrage would have told her not to mess up her hair, if it wasn’t already an unmitigated disaster of knots, cow-licks and stuck feathers. “No really, he died yesterday, he’s from Japan, where all the chosen heroes of various quests come from. As for his wish, well, if you’d please-” She tried to pry the pillow away, but it only resulted in her lifting the Devil up along with it. “-if you’d PLEASE have a look! It’s completely illegible. These lines, they’re… What do they call it? Non-newtonian? Non-euclidian? You love this stuff.”

“loving” was going quite a bit too far, walking straight off a cliff face and plummeting into the gnawing abyss below, but Kaisa did from time to time help with tasks that at the very least weren’t mind numbing. It was something to waste eternity on; the occasional riddle. If you got into heaven, and it was by no means easy, you arrived along with a slip of paper stating your final wish. It was the job of heaven’s bureaucracy to fulfil that wish, and in the case of cryptic phrasing figure out its meaning. With Martin Briggs, “cryptic” would be the understatement of the aeon. The cryptic ones that the devil mildly enjoyed figuring out still had words for the most part, whereas this looked like the winding pattern traced out by barcode readers.

Another groan. “Fine. Fucking fine, lead me to your mystery-douche so I can sleuth this shit as the only vaguely competent creature in this hellscape on an afterlife.” Arbitrage winced with every uttered swear like flinching away from a hot stove. All angels were like this, so far as the devil could tell, and the devil could tell close to everything, but it looked especially cute on Arbitrage’s perma-smiling, doe-eyed face.

Kaisa got up slowly, making a show of excessive lethargy befitting of someone who hadn’t left the couch in what corresponded to roughly twenty-earth years, although she didn’t need to worry about muscle atrophy of course. Not only because she was a supernatural creature, but also because she never had too much muscle to begin with. “Can you give me the deets already?”

“His good deeds? Oh, when he was twelve he-”

“DEETS, Arbitrage. Details. Who is this fuck and why do we care?” Kaisa fished beneath the pillows for panties, a bra, her ceremonial robe adorned with various shifting forms of blackest night, and worn-out combat boots. She kissed Arbitrage, evoking another stove-touch reaction, since she, having the longterm-memory and pattern-recognition skills of a goldfish had somehow failed to see this coming. Then, the devil fished a quill out of her messy, dark purple hair that faded into slate near the root, and began writing. In part she noted down the major events of Martin’s life, but also the location of a crack she had found between the pillows. A crack in space, an existential disconnect running through cosmic liminality. This wasn’t good. Anomalies were piling up, and she had a good idea as to why. Kaisa smiled to reassure her companion. There was no need for her to know about this yet.

If you’re a mythical creature of gnome-rank or higher, dying is the quickest way to get anywhere you want to go. “Doors are for chumps” is among the first lessons you learn when you find yourself as the sort of numinal agent that the two women currently falling out of a non-existent window into a supernova were. “Dying, as a divine being, is difficult” is the second lesson.

When their forms fully reassembled, which took about a planck-second, but felt from the inside more like five minutes, they stood in the central plaza, looking at a definitively non-japanese, but quite startled-looking, Martin Briggs. Apparently one did not need to be japanese in order to die in japan.

He had been an interior designer in the country. Well liked. Successful enough to rent a place of his own which was worth designing, though in his private life he gravitated towards minimalism. Where the confusion in his eyes ended lingered a sort of resigned sadness, which stemmed from the fact that he had been stabbed by his neighbour of five years for the crime of having listened to loud music on a workday night. He had forgiven the neighbour, that’s why he was here in the afterlife and not in the outer darkness.

“Who are you?” the hero asked. He had seen enough anime to know he had been isekaid, but not enough to have thought of a cool introduction. Arbitrage loved when people did that. Kaisa hated it. Cool introductions were for people who couldn’t rely on actions to earn their status.

“I, mortal, am Arbitrage, angel of justice and tipper of scales, divine law and eternal judgement personified, but you can call me Amy.” Her pastel-coloured hippie-dress and hair fluttered in a breeze that none of the other parties involved could feel. “Welcome to the afterlife. You have been deemed worthy”

“Hey, I’m Satan. Yes, the Satan. Don’t make a big deal out of it, I promise this makes sense.” Arbitrage kicked for her ankles, attempting to get her to play the role properly, but Kaisa just stepped aside. “Now, what in the ever-loving fuck is this?”. Martin stared blankly at the note that was supposed to represent his ultimate wish.

“I don’t know. Looks like some sort of Rorschach test” The new arrival could never decipher their note until their wish was fulfilled. It always read as gibberish, but Kaisa had sort of hoped that by way of some weird glitch, the legibility had simply been reversed here. Still, even though her own idea had been stupid, she couldn’t get over the fact of what a braindead answer “it looks like a Rorschach test” was. The Devil remembered Earth well enough, and was relatively certain that psychologists had the legal right to punch you in the face when you answered “Rorschach test” with regards to a Rorschach test. It was simply the sort of tautological bullshit that no field outside of Wittgensteinian philosophy could tolerate.

“Try again. Come on, you know how those work”

“Uhhh butterfly? Some kind of bear-mask? My estranged father riding a unicycle? What is this? Some sort of interrogation? It’s meaningless”

Arbitrage ran over to hug Martin, pressing him against her chest and cautioning against saying such terrible things. That there was a higher reason for him being here, and that he would find it, just like he would find his estranged dad, that the devil knew didn’t actually exist.

“Great job speed-running the human condition my guy. Your hopes and dreams are just as meaningless as everyone else’s, but this is still our job so would you please sign the contract and let me solve this wish-tangle of yours? I really wanna get to bed again”

Martin looked up at Arbitrage. “I’m not really supposed to make a pact with the devil, right? That’s like so wrong on so many levels.” She smiled as always “why not? Kai-kai is-” “don’t call me that” “Kaisa is really good at this type of thing. You could make this contract with me, but if I’m perfectly honest I really don’t like my chances. My thing is being good and just and beautiful and a really great guide, but when it comes to thinky stuff, you really can’t go wrong with Satan.”

“you’re kidding me.” The hero was gesticulating wildly, attempting to reorder a number of ridiculous terrestrial fairly tales about demonic soul-selling in his mind, before Kaisa sighed, strode forward in her idiosyncratically archetypal robe, boots and underwear getup and pressed her palm against Martin’s forehead. Her infernally orange-red cat-eyes flared open and tore concept-space into frayed strings of exotic matter. Gravity seemed to cycle through directions which hadn’t existed moments earlier, before settling on “backwards” and ripping the two of them, still connected by the surprising strength of the devil’s grip into nothingness. Reality compressed into a flat plane without changing shape and rotated along the surface of whatever realm they were currently inhabiting before clicking back into place and flinging the hero, Kaisa, and the angel floating excitedly besides them into a field made of clouds.

“Just to be extra clear here; just because you’re in heaven doesn’t mean you have rights, okay? We’re celestial beings, we do what we want” The devil explained, untethering her palm and resting it upon her hip.

“she does what she wants”, Arbitrage clarified. “The rest of us actually wait for consent before instantiating a contract.”

“Well, it’s inefficient, and we have bigger things to worry about”

“We have?” both of them asked simultaneously.

“Sorry. I have.” Kaisa patted the angel’s head, which was quite difficult to reach due to the difference in height. “You just do your tour-guide thing, and you-” she looked at Martin “Don’t even worry about it. This scribble: It probably just means you’re an idiot who doesn’t know what he wants. That’s normal for people. Just let us adults figure it out.”

There was some more whining about consent violations and wanting his soul back, but it gradually faded into silence as the clouds reshaped themselves into various structures. People sat suspended in the air, most of them in lotus position, most of them with their eyes closed. According to Arbitrage it was a mix of mortals experiencing Zen by some way or another. According to Kaisa it was like that woman from infinite jest who never opened her eyes out of fear that she might have gone blind. They could enter heaven so long as they did not perceive it. Martin had experienced neither Zen nor the writing of David Foster Wallace, so Arbitrage explained both to him in hopes that it might help with the soul-quest.

Of course there were exceptions. Recently there had been exceptions with a lot of things due to the meddling of that god damn woman and her egomaniacal bullshit. One of the exceptions called itself Lynn and looked like an eleven year old girl in a light blue dress because she was exactly that. Lynn had found a glitch in the structure of simple arithmetics, such that she could loop out of reality and into the celestial realm by performing mental multiplication of Mersenne primes at sufficient speeds, which she was quite good at. It was all coming apart at the seams and no one was noticing. Lynn did this to get out of history class and Arbitrage as well as a bunch of other angels were encouraging it. Playing with the girl and attempting to shape her into something like humanity’s next saviour. Currently Arbitrage was levitating the giggling little girl through a number of cloud-rings.

“Hey, Lynn, you think you know where the queen bitch is? I could find her myself, but I always get a headache from making contracts.” Kaisa shouted into the air. “Meet Martin by the way. He’s recently deceased and we have no fucking idea what his wish is.” The girl’s eyes widened. She had successfully evaded Arbitrage’s half hearted attempt at covering her ears to protect her from the profanity by teleporting elsewhere and was now jumping up and down in front of Kaisa.

“Can I see it miss Satan? Pretty please? I’ll help you if you do, I promise” Lynn made puppy-dog eyes at the devil, who was only a few centimetres taller than her. Showing wishes to the insufficiently numinal, much less to actual genuine mortals who were decent at basic maths was wildly against protocol of course, but then again, there were no repercussions to breaking protocol, and Kaisa was the devil.

“alright, alright” she dangled the piece of paper in front of Lynn’s face for a few seconds. “now, where is Cynthia?” The bit about being able to find her alone was a lie, just another one of the strange glitches that were popping up due to Cynthia’s presence. The cracks in reality, the undecipherable notes, Lynn. The splitting headache was real, but it might have just been another side-effect.

Slowly, the girl’s mouth opened and closed. “This looks like a Lorenz system. Do you like chaotic attractors mister Martin?”. Martin had no idea what that was and Lynn frowned.

“The queen b-” Arbitrage gave the best death glare her face could muster, which without the context of her normal expression would be read as mild disgruntlement at best. “...Cynthia is on earth three it seems like. Can I come with?”

The two celestials looked at each other. “no way” said the angel. “sure” said Kaisa, and so the four of them exploded through null-space, emerging in the capital of earth three.

All five alternative earths could be described by the fact that Hayao Miyazaki was never born in them for different reasons. On earth three he was never born because the concept of birth did not exist and thus no one was born ever. Instead all persons simply existed from the start and always would exist until they were unborn by cosmic heat death. It was curious that all cultures of earth three referred to entropic dissipation as “unbirth”, despite the fact that birth didn’t exist and to their planet as “earth three” despite never having made contact with any of the other earths, but scholars agreed that linguistic quirks were the least interesting and least confusing aspect of the sub universe, which meant that the reason for these things was barely explored. The entire planet and surrounding cosmos had become an adjunct of heaven by way of Cynthia Mandelbrot’s wish to rule a world and by way of Kaisa’s troubling ability to grant it.

A continent sized meteoroid blanked out a broad swath of the sky, preparing for devastation, imperceptibly accelerating. The world was always ending here. The world had been ending since Cynthia came to power, which had retroactively become the very beginning. Lynn’s mouth was hanging open again, but it didn’t stop her from pointing out that this was an Asteroid, not a Meteoroid. None of the others replied. Arbitrage was still talking to Martin.

The enormous cathedral occupying the centre of the city constituted Cynthia’s palace. Her throne adorned with so many gemstones that its actual form was barely recognizable, and the way she was strangely lounging across it in her overly revealing chain-link getup only made it look more uncomfortable. Satan had found the outfit hot before she got to know the person wearing it.

“Kaisaaa~, Arbitrage~, I haven’t seen you in while, how are you doing?” The woman wasn’t even looking at the two pseudo-mortals in their company, as she picked grapes from the gold platter strapped around the back of one of her underlings. “Have you seen the spectacle outside? It is gonna be stunning, I promise.”

“We’ve… We’ve come to rescue you from the path of evil and get you a redemption arc?” Arbitrage exclaimed gleefully, despite being miles off. Martin had been going through a number of differently flavoured mental breakdowns and was borderline catatonic at this point. Lynn was looking out the window towards imminent doom with youthful wonder.

“Cynthia, what did you do to this place?” Kaisa’s voice reverberated through the mosaic-littered space of glass and granite. The woman giggled. “Oh, you’re so gonna love this. I call it clout-storage. Look:” She turned to one of the hunched over figures walking through the cathedral, a young boy with a shaved head who couldn’t be much older than Lynn “What did I do to this place?”

“This is heaven 3.0” The voice didn’t suit him, the texture of it like a parrot repeating lines from an uncomfortably sterile commercial. “Our great empress realized that humans didn’t really want to be comfortable. All the people in positions of comfort seek out dangerous hobbies like adventure-sports, gambling or-” he shuddered theatrically, and it looked terribly rehearsed again “… politics. What people really want is the thrill and simplicity brought about by actual stakes. They want to be heroes or at the very least heroic, so our wonderful despot has sacrificed herself by taking on the burden of instituting a permanently eschatonic global fascism under her reign. Everyone can pick up the mantle, everyone can fix something, because everything is broken. Hooray Cynthia”

Of course. Parasocial influencer-culture had managed to ruin even heaven. Despite being the worst person imaginable, Cynthia had accumulated so many followers on earth who prayed for her that she had managed to sneak into the afterlife regardless. There was no other possible source for this sort of tension in concept-space, Kaisa thought. She must be the source of the glitches.

“So,what are you gonna do about the asteroid? Even you don’t want to rule over rubble, I presume.”

Cynthia shrugged “This baby? You honestly think this is gonna leave any rubble to rule over? Nah, I’ve just gotten tired of this place, you know. Of course you know. You’ve been tired of it for much longer than I have, Kaisa. Time to face the fax.”

“but your-”

“Nope. My wish was to rule over a world, not to have ruled over a world, dear.” the chains rattled as she laughed. “Phrasing’s a bitch. You will simply have to fashion me a new one.”

That laugh again. Here was someone far more fit to be the devil, but there was no time to mourn their mixed-up roles on the stage of cosmology. Lynn was mortal. Properly mortal. And for a mortal to die in the afterlife meant… Well she didn’t know what it meant, but the devil sure as fuck didn’t intend to find out. Kaisa grabbed Martin and Lynn by the wrists and drew them out into a limousine that parked outside the palace. Another spell, another tearing of concept space into frayed strands enveloping the hunk of metal. Then she too got in and started driving.

Getting away was impossible of course. Pressing down on the pedal more a tactile distraction than any sort of attempt to get somewhere, to a place that would be nothing more than space-dust any minute now. Any second. Any moment. Kaisa corrected backwards as the ground exploded beneath them. Misjudging the speeds of falling objects wasn’t like her, though traumatic situation decreased even a demon’s cognitive capacity. The world disappeared into a green flash that she couldn’t manage to care enough about to be confused by. Possibly copper or boron deposits in the asteroid. That’s what Lynn said. Kaisa held her own forehead, letting go of the steering wheel and feeling space rip a bit further. The scorch marks that had apparently still been on her face left a greyish streak across the woman’s left palm. “I will kill her. I will fucking kill her”. It sounded like thoughts in her mind, but she seemed to be speaking them by the feeling of her lips. Not that anyone could hear. While the enchanted car kept them safe, it didn’t protect against the sound of a planetary collision. Outside the windows was dust and void and overheated sediment vying for dominance in a mad swirl of unfathomable destruction. Then it was suddenly silent.

The mental landscape of Kaisa Solomon Goetia had become utterly unaccustomed to the sensation of caring through the centuries. Sometimes she almost forgot that everything was her fault. The gaudy white limousine was still falling through space when Arbitrage opened a door and got in. Kaisa hadn’t worried about her, since the angel of justice was immortal anyway, but now a bit of unease was flooding in. Her hair was glowing less than usual, and she wasn’t smiling. In Arbitrage’s hands rested a tray of still-steaming cookies “Hey, sorry for the delay. You all must be going through… Well, you must be having quite the experience and… I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.”

Martin grabbed a cookie and bit into it, chewing like an automaton on autopilot before turning to Kaisa. “How are you the devil?” She wanted Arbitrage to shoot her in the head again, wanted the frictional heat to disrupt all her currently occurring thought patterns, but she knew it didn’t work like that. “You really don’t want to-” The angel cautioned, but Satan wasn’t listening.

“Shut the- please shut the fuck up Amy.” If the fiery glow of her eyes could produce tears, they would be doing so. How was she the devil? How did that happen? It had been a completely normal day, perhaps slightly tinged with sepia as would be becoming of a flashback, though by no means excessively. Kaisa had always been clumsy, people used to tell her. Bad at the little things. Bad at existing. She had wanted to boil some eggs, and she had wanted help from her friend, because she knew that something would go wrong. Something would inevitably capture a structural intensity of the moment and spell disaster. She called her. Standing in her kitchen and sipping tea. She called her and the friend, whose face and voice and name she couldn’t remember anymore, but whose mnemonic absence still sent searing pain through Kaisa’s mind said “What’s the worst that could happen?”.

She hadn’t asked for help. Would have felt silly to. She just hung up. This. This was the worst that could happen. Kaisa attempted to boil eggs and became a demon. Not any demon, but Lucifer. She became retroactively responsible for every catastrophe, every evil, every inconvenience throughout human history in her attempt to make a normal fucking breakfast. They always told her she was unlucky. They couldn’t even fathom how unlucky she was, how unlucky humanity was to have brought her about.

Kaisa looked up through the tears that weren’t there. Martin’s face, which had previously been marked by nothing but existential confusion and passive observation now traced out serious concern. “That sounds like hella self loathing you’ve got going on. Jesus.” He stuffed another cookie into his mouth. “They’re really good, you know?”

Of course they were good. They were made by an angel. She wanted to laugh about this mere human and his sympathy for a creature of unfathomable evil, if it wasn’t so obviously pathetic, and if her muscles could be fucked to remember the contraction pattern for anything approaching laughter at this moment. She just felt so empty. One with the cloud of freshly produced cosmic dust surrounding them. “I couldn’t hate myself enough if I tried. You saw what just happened.” The occasional distraction was just enough to stop her from trying, and sleep was even better. The devil couldn’t bear to look at the consequences of its existence.

“No, come on, I thought you were clever. Think this through!” Instinctively she pulled back her hand when the hero tried to grab it. “when you became a demon you became responsible, retro-causally, for everything bad that ever happened, which would have to include what happened to you, right? Why were you unlucky? Who was punishing you? All of this only makes sense as a weird time-loop fuelled entirely by your self-loathing. No one else could have made you the devil, since you are responsible for all bad things, no?” Any possible epiphany ricocheted into nothingness. Who had given him the impression that he was a main character?

“Buddy, I get that you’re new to this, and it’s a really nice pep-talk, but reality is coming apart at the seams. I allowed this bitch to ruin a whole ass universe as well as possibly more to come and almost killed a middle-schooler. If you really want to help me, and I have no idea why you would; try to figure out what your fucking wish is about so I can go back to focusing on the important things like figuring out with overwhelmingly punctilious accuracy exactly how much of a piece of shit I am. Is that doable?” Kaisa tried go glare knives at him, but her heart wasn’t in it. Her heart beat dark sludge at the centre of the universe corrupting it with ever-spreading tendrils.

The condescension wasn’t landing well. “Is it that impossible for you to believe that I’m part of the solution to this? Arbitrage has been given me this “hero of prophecy”-spiel all day. The letter I was sent with is something that no one here has ever encountered before, and you, the person who made a pact with me against my will have done nothing but ignore me like I’m a nuisance. What’s that about?” he seemed angry now, or maybe like someone performing anger in order to be listened to. The line got blurred towards indiscernibility incredibly quickly. “All the glitches that have been popping up were bad. They’re dangerous. They’re things to be fixed, so why the fuck would your little printer error of a note be any different. Just stay where I can see you and I’ll figure this out.”

“Because I feel like I should be able to help” his voice was pleading now and Kaisa couldn’t quite look him in the eyes anymore. “Well, get in fucking line then”.

“If you feel like it’s just a distraction, and if I’m keeping you from doing important things, then why did you even make the contract?”

The answer was simple: Arbitrage had asked her to. Arbitrage who now sat in the back of the limousine, hugging Lynn, crying and begging them to stop. Arbitrage who probably hadn’t averted her eyes from the destruction of earth three.

A long silence suffused the car like tea steeping in the ocean

Finally Martin spoke up again: “I might know what it is. The wish. I might also be evil. Maybe those are just the sort of contracts you get these days. All my life I’ve been able to just forgive people. For anything. I was able to forgive the guy who fucking killed me in the moment of him doing it, because there’s always a reason. Always. It always makes sense and we can’t argue with what makes sense, right?” He took a deep breath. “but there was this one time. I was at a train station and asked a woman to take care of my bag while I went to the bathroom. She said yes, but when I came back… Well, when I came back she was gone. The bag was still there. No one had grabbed it. It hadn’t been stolen… But why? If she didn’t have time, she could have simply said so. Didn’t make sense. Just didn’t make sense. Couldn’t be forgiven. I think I might want revenge.”

And so it began again, like with Cynthia. No one ever learned, especially not demons, and so a contract had been made and Kaisa would have to stick by it. She felt that devils should not be bound so easily, but none the less the limousine drifted soundlessly into an adjacent reality. Satan would get retroactive revenge for a bag that wasn’t even stolen.

The day was tomorrow, five years ago on a Thursday. Earth, or rather earth two by external appellation and also it was the day that a bag was abandoned and possibly coincidentally the day that a young woman from Ottawa became quintessentially irredeemable. That was Martin’s theory at least: that Kaisa had somehow died with the incredibly maladaptive wish to never be forgiven, and Lynn seemed to also think that made sense.

Time-travel on the other hand didn’t make sense to Lynn, and Arbitrage wasn’t very good at outlining the exact mechanisms underlying the continuous existence and accessibility of all moments across all world-lines. She would be the spy standing guard inside the train station, since she was the least suspicious seeming, what with the two ridiculous looking celestials and Martin, who would be a duplicate of himself. That much made sense. Lynn had seen a few time-travel movies with her family and they seemed structurally simple enough.

Everything played out as described, the woman received Martin’s oversized travel bag and continued to lean on it with one hand as she took a call on her phone. Lynn couldn’t hear what the woman was talking about, since the station was quite noisy at this time of day, though some distress was clearly visible on her face when she hung up. Lynn tried to get closer to the woman,but failed. She had a blonde pixie cut, a turtle neck, a deep green autumn coat and she was pacing; tracing out ever wider concentric circles spiralling away from the bag before returning and positioning a piece of paper on top. Then, the woman bolted out of the station.

This was an issue. Lynn knew this part from the movies. When people’s memories don’t match what is happening in the past, then it is the time-traveller's job to realign the two. The memories are like that because time had already (and therefore would be) tampered with. She took the slip of paper and placed it inconspicuously in her pocket. It read “I’m really sorry, something came up and I have to check whether my friend is okay”. Skipping back outside to reunite with Arbitrage, the little girl felt quite proud of herself to have done genuine work in the service of heaven.

The day was tomorrow, five years ago on a Thursday, but a bit later than last time. Kaisa’s apartment, or rather past-Kaisa’s apartment by accurate appellation. A young woman had just died in her third floor residence after asking a profoundly dangerous question: “what’s the worst that could happen”. Future Kaisa had taken the corpse and put it in a cabinet, because the sight was ever so slightly disturbing to her despite the profound emotional numbing she had incurred over the course of a day that wasn’t this one. The Devil lay on the floor of her kitchen, right where she had once found her end and wondered if reality could be saved and if she had really been so cruel as to damn herself to this fate like Martin seemed to believe. If she did, she damned herself for it, and the issue with such loops did not escape her notice.

There was a knocking on the door. First four then four again but more agitated. Finally a whole cascade of wild bangs before a sound similar to that of a revolver going off into your skull put an end to the knocking as well as to the structural integrity of past-her’s apartment door.

Next scene. Ever since her little breakdown in the car, reality consisted of barely interlocking fragments that fell apart and reassembled fully independent of anyone’s conscious control. A ridiculously tall person with a sharp jaw, a green, knee-length coat and frantic breathing stood over her. The moment was shaped by one-sided recognition, before the woman, attempting not to collapse onto the ground as well, berated Kaisa for making her worry and complementing her on the heterodox new look (though she did caution against wearing it outside). In between the downpour of various sentences and exhausted gasps, “are those scorch-marks on your forehead?” “What’s up with the novelty contact lenses?” “can you stand?”, the devil lay on wooden planks awestruck, as her mind rearranged a litany of information snippets into coherent order.

“motherfucker”

Amelia filled a glass from the counter with tap water, raised it up as if to toast and proclaimed “motherfucker ghasp indeed”.

“No, just no. You have no idea what’s going on, what’s BEEN going on. I... I’ll explain this later.” Kaisa had teleported to the other corner of the room to lend her statement more gravity. “I need your help. For real this time.”

The hill on which Arbitrage and Martin sat overlooked all of reality and all of primate-perceptible unreality, in a way that was so difficult to put into words that no culture in the surrounding area had ever bothered to invent language.

“So, do you like my plan? This much energy isn’t supposed to exist in one spot, so it’s been a chore to keep it all together, but now everything is working out, see?” She somehow looked older when Kaisa wasn’t present, and her smile looked more dignified. A gun still shimmered in Arbitrage’s hand and Martin occasionally got worried about that, any time his mental environs could be wrought into a usable enough shape to worry for a few seconds.

“It’s…” he wanted to say “overcomplicated”, but that’s an assessment which could only be made if one understood the motivation at work. “why?”

“Because I’m Arbitrage, angel of justice and tipper of scales, divine law and eternal judgement. Let me tell you; THIS…” she gestured at the everything with a sweeping motion “is a fatalistic balancing act that takes a great deal of effort sometimes. Maybe it is overcomplicated.” Arbitrage didn’t make a big deal out of reading minds. “I’m not that good at planning, I just try to help, and some people need to first be gotten to a point where they can accept that.”

“Like Kaisa?”

“Oh god yes. Most people don’t take Millennia of being Satan before they ask for help, but here we are.”

Martin wanted to ask if the divine being to his left had seen an anime called Madoka Magica, but he managed to refrain. Time mechanics weren’t something he was exceptionally comfortable with managing. That’s why he had refused to come along with the others, but he still felt that everything was unresolved in various places. “So I guess I didn’t take revenge, right? Will not have taken it? It’s not that I’m complaining about being a good person, I’m relieved about that part, but I don’t feel like I’ve been able to forgive. That doesn’t seem like something I can retroactively decide to have done.”

Arbitrage’s smile was wide again “You can do anything you want, but since I am not Satan, I will not force you to. For what it’s worth; your wish should be legible now, if you still care, though it isn’t what you think it is. As for revenge, the angel of justice would be the last to deny you that.” She paused. “Back when I was a human I died of lung cancer, you know? I’m not that hung up about it.” Everything suddenly failed to have ever made sense in the first place.

The day was today, in the tenuous way in which all timekeeping occurs throughout the afterlife and its adjuncts. Saturday by any and all subjective metrics. Earth three, by way of both external and internal appellation. Exa-tons of kinetically lethal space-rock blotted out the setting sun above a world ruled by the quite possibly worst person alive, and time, as it was often wont to do, looped into itself according to the whims of fickle gods. If all went well, then everyone was already safe, but if not… Kaisa Solomon Goetia had never been one for excessive optimism, though luckily the woman by her side had, was, and would be.

“Amy, whatever happens next, I love you, okay. From your perspective it’s been what? A week since we last saw each other, but for me it’s…”

Amelia just nodded and wiped a tear from the orange cat-eyes before it could boil off. “You’ve had quite the experience, huh?” She said this as though she wasn’t herself floating mid-air beneath a death-rock. “Do your worst, chief.”

And so Kaisa pressed her palm against the young woman’s forehead, the usual rush of cosmic power diluvially surging through her endocrine system. It felt warmer than normal, sort of like a hug if hugs consisted of myriad particle explosions throughout concept-space. Laymen would describe the thing happening in front of her as a magical girl transformation, while more serious scholars might stick to more serious terms like “apotheosis”, though even they couldn’t ignore the striking prevalence of certain aesthetic markers inherent to the outfit change and transformation of hairstyle as well as colour.

If Kaisa hadn’t already figured everything out, she might have been shocked by the similarity that Amy’s mahou shoujo state bore to Arbitrage. Her hair wasn’t quite as long, nor quite as alabaster, though it did emit the same kind of etherial light that the angel’s did. The variation upon a japanese sailor uniform, the stockings and the green sunglasses resembling stylized scales were a different matter entirely, but Kaisa could get used to them, she thought. This way she simply had to cognitively catch up to the implications of a causal loop in which two goddesses create each other at infinitum. She also wondered when and why Amy would relinquish swearing entirely, though she supposed that she too had gone through a number of character arcs over the aeons. It didn’t matter. She would find out. Everything would resolve itself in its tediously circumlocutory way if they defeated one e-celeb. How hard could it be?

The force of guards assembled outside Cynthia’s cathedral would have offered little resistance, though the possibility of a paradox created by mindlessly walking into their past and future selves respectively might have. Rather; the two of them landed on a platform that protruded from the roughly hewn east tower and descended towards the sanctum from there. Luckily for coordination purposes, the servant’s skill at projecting his voice was quite impressive, and so Kaisa could time their entrance exactly to the moment that a few-hours younger version of herself, less traumatized by both a genocide and the sight of her own corpse, had stormed out.

Cynthia screamed for guards, though it didn’t do much. Their cheers were niche accompaniment to the rattle of chains as she was decked in the face. Somewhere, the delusion that her people loved her shattered in the mind of a monster, and somewhere relatively close to that spot, the body of a monster hit the granite floor and performed a few involuntary flips. Things like this did not kill people. Not in the afterlife.

Cynthia performed a sweeping gesture with her hand, and twelve octahedral fireballs appeared in orbit around her forearm, which she fired one by one, still screaming for the guards who had long vacated the building only to stream back in once they saw the Asteroid. The Devil gestured towards Amy, and they both pressed their palms into the cold stone, feeling the tingling sensation that one experiences at the back of one’s skull before attempting something seriously dangerous. All of earth three was emerald flashes blinking in and out of concept-space at various locations and times, various orientations and velocities, various states of consensus-existence. Past and future were inverted along axes invented for this very purpose and promptly discarded into the space where time dries its laundry. For a moment, everything failed to have ever made sense in the first place, though that moment would eternally occupy this very spot, making it hardly a moment in the traditional sense. The last instance of earth three, milliseconds before the entropic unbirth of its host universe now sat snugly beneath the asteroid, temporal energy still ominously illuminating its surface which for the blink of an eye supported only a very gaudy white limousine and the angel of justice stabilizing the process from the other side of cosmic chronology. Stabilized to the best of their collective ability. Some adjacent moments did sustain tears. Some outer darkness did bleed through, though these sorts of things were unavoidable.

The swap luckily had disoriented Cynthia enough that none of the projectiles did hit, though this wasn’t nearly as bad as the fact that she found herself bathed in the light of a soon-to-be supernova that now tidally locked her little cathedral to its own gravity well. The rest of the planet was gone, dropped off in one of the many safe locations that unconstrained possibility-space had to offer.

They say that in space, no one can hear you scream, though Cynthia sure did try, when the two women who had appeared out of nowhere mere seconds ago flung themselves out of the stained-glass window.

Dinner had already been prepared in Kaisa’s little room that consisted of mostly void and else-wise windows, one of which now lay in shambles, though this did not matter much to anyone present. The door on the ceiling was no longer locked, despite the fact that this was more of a symbolic gesture than anything else. They sat on the floor that wasn’t there and it served this purpose well enough. A cigarette had been given to the younger Arbitrage by Martin. Kaisa didn’t remember Amy ever smoking, though when she asked what this was about, the older Arbitrage had simply said something about revenge and left it at that. She seemed perfectly content with the situation.

There was something very aesthetic to it; the young woman in her ridiculous outfit with its semicircular shades and glowing hair smoking in front of a broken window that looked out towards celestial cataclysm.

She would have to go back, Kaisa knew that. She would have to go back just like Lynn, because in the end this Amy was still just a glorified mortal, pact with the devil or no. She would still have the other Amy, the one who had constructed this entire byzantine plot, and she liked Arbitrage, she truly did like Arbitrage with her goofy grin and unrelenting optimism, but there was this distance between them now. A gap which made her feel like the angel was already far more inhuman that she was, and she didn’t know if she wanted to bridge it. Maybe this would ameliorate by itself, maybe it wouldn’t, but for now she couldn’t help but want her Amy, the one she would at some point turn into Arbitrage. Kaisa couldn’t wait to see the rest of their time cycle play out.

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